Jonah Hex reviews

http://regularmoviegoer.blogspot.com/2010/06/jonah-hex.html

Friday, June 25, 2010
'Jonah Hex'
'Jonah Hex' (PG-13) (1 star)

Writers: Mark Nelvedine and Brian Taylor
Director: Jimmy Hayward
Starring: Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malcovich, Will Arnett, Michael Fassbender, Aidan Quinn

"Jonah Hex" is one of those comic books adaptations that give comic book adaptations a bad name. This movie is one of the most boring and joyless movies I have seen since "Killers" a while back. Boy does this summer movie season suck! The movie is simply a revenge tale and hyped up Western that is wall to wall shootouts and nothing else. There are no characters we care about, no laughs or any logic to the action scenes. Josh Brolin is a very good actor and he tries here but there is only so much you can do with badly written crap. Megan Fox continues to be a bad actress and I don't get her appeal but then I am not a horny ten year old boy. I give the movie 1 star for Brolin and Megan Fox's eyes which are beautiful. Oh and John Malcovich appears and is slumming it here as the man who killed Jonah's family. The movie opens with narration and comic book cartoon scenes. After 45 minutes of shootings and terrible one liners I wished the movie went back to cartoon form. The movie is dark, boring and very unnecessary. I couldn't wait to leave and then I fell asleep and then I thought about how much time I had after this movie to see a movie that had to be better than this. Actually watching an Ernest movie or a Pauly Shore movie would be better than this turkey.
Posted by Vincent Snavely at 4:57 PM

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Michael Fassbender a ‘X-Men: First Class’. Lo siento Spidey

No se repetirá otra vez, o al menos en muchos años, que un actor suene al mismo tiempo para dos films de superhéroes y en las dos para ser el villano. Una pena que sean dos Estudios diferentes los que se pugnaban al profesional, pero no será ni la primera ni la última que los personajes se reparten de forma extraña en el género.

Ryan Reynolds pasó de ser Deadpool de la Marvel a ‘Green Lantern’ de la Warner. Chris Evans salta de ‘Los 4 Fantásticos’ de la Fox a ‘Captain America’ de la Marvel, y hasta James Marsden fue el primer Cíclope de los ‘X-Men’ de la Fox para ser después el hijo de Perry White en ‘Superman Returns’. Ahora es Michael Fassbender quien prefiere mutantes sobre arácnido.

Finalmente el actor de ‘Inglourious Basterds’ ha fichado con la Fox para el film de Matthew Vaughn ‘X-Men: First Class’ y le dice adiós al reboot de ‘Spiderman’ para la Sony, que deberá de buscarse a otro para encarnar a ese misterioso villano que se enfrentará al trepamuros en su reinicio cinematográfico.

Como ya sabíamos, Fassbender será Magneto, el Anakin Skywalker de esta película, donde comenzará como compañero de Xavier (James McAvoy) y acabará, puede que no ahora, puede que en otra secuela, como el enemigo mortal que todos conocemos.

Fassbender se une a los confirmados Amber Heard como Mystique, Rosamund Pike como Moira McTaggert y Benjamin Walker como Bestia. Quedan por atar a Frank Dillane a.k.a. niño Voldemort, otro de la lista ‘Spidey’ que se pasa al universo X, y Aaron Johnson (’Kick-Ass’) que deshoja la margarita para ser el protagonista, Cíclope.

No deben tardar mucho, ya que la preproducción comienza este verano. Antes de rodarla, ya tengo ganas de verla.

http://willdlee.blogspot.com/2010/06/jonah-hex.html

Jonah Hex
Jonah Hex - Dir. Jimmy Hayward (2010)

Comic book movies are now a staple of the summer blockbuster season. This modern age of the comic book film can be traced back to an unlikely source in Blade. For decades, Marvel had attempted to turn their characters into successful feature films. Yet, all they had to show for it are a pair of awful direct-to-video movies based on Captain America and the Punisher and a Roger Corman-directed Fantastic Four that was never even released. With top properties like Spider-Man and the X-Men languishing in development hell, it was a D-list character that broke through for Marvel and set the stage for Iron Man and others.

In recent years, Marvel’s main competitor, DC Comics, has had massive success with its rebooted Batman franchise. However, Superman Returns was a failure and they’ve struggled to get other A-list characters like Wonder Woman and the Flash off the ground while Green Lantern finally hits screens next year. It only makes sense for DC to exploit its lesser known characters or creator-owned properties to fill the void. And along rides Jonah Hex.

Hex was created by John Albano and Tony DeZuniga and first appeared in 1971 in All-Star Western #10. Set in the Old West, Hex was a bounty hunter with half his face hideously scarred. He was sold into slavery to the Apache as a child and fought for the Confederacy in adulthood. Later, he was revamped with a supernatural bent as part of DC’s Vertigo imprint. The movie version combines a little bit of both, but is a very loose adaptation of the character.

Josh Brolin stars as Jonah Hex; a Civil War veteran who surrendered to the Union as a result his best friend Jeb Turnbull (an uncredited Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is killed. Jeb’s father, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) blames Hex. Hex is forced to watch helplessly as Turnbull murders his wife and son then brands his face. Near death, Hex is saved by Indians and the ordeal leaves him with the power to temporarily speak with the dead.

Since then, the disfigured anti-hero has made his mark as a renowned bounty hunter and gunfighter of exceptional skill. Meanwhile, Turnbull has become a terrorist striking out against the American government. He steals a massive supergun, dubbed the ‘Nation Killer,’ in order to destroy Washington during the country’s centennial celebration.

Jonah Hex endured a problematic journey into the theaters. The script was originally written by Neveldine & Taylor, the team behind the Crank films and Gamer, who were also attached to direct. Brolin signed onto the project supposedly because he loved its atrociousness. The pair left the project and was eventually replaced by the oddball choice of Jimmy Hayward whose only previous experience was the animated Horton Hears a Who. The project saw last minute reshoots under the supervision of Francis Lawrence (Constantine, I Am Legend) and a massive retooling of the plot.

What’s left is a complete mess that is barely 80 minutes long, not counting the credits. Jonah Hex is like two fractured films hastily duct taped together. There is a strange battle on a metaphysical plain between Hex and Turnbull that was originally set to be the climax of the movie. Instead, it’s clumsily and confusingly intercut with two major sequences of the final product. The mystical elements are excised and in their place we find ludicrous weaponry like saddle-mounted Gatling guns, dynamite launching crossbows, and a monstrous cannon powered by glowing orange orbs invented by Eli Whitney, the creator of the cotton gin. No, really.

Some of the cast seem to realize what a colossal turd they’re in and play along. Brolin tries to rise above it all as the gravelly voiced Hex while Michael Fassbender goes over-the-top as a knife-wielding Irish henchman. Megan Fox also appears as a tough hooker with a lilting Southern accent and an impossibly thin hourglass waist. She seriously looks like she’ll snap in half at any second. For some reason, Fox almost always appears in close-ups with soft lighting no matter what the situation. Will Arnett is woefully miscast as a straight-laced Union officer while Michael Shannon pops in for one and only one scene as the ringleader of an underground fight club. Both actors are victims of the reshoots and slapdash editing.

Jonah Hex never purports to be anything more than a low-grade B-movie. Some might be able to enjoy it on a ‘so bad, it’s good’ level, but not me. Jonah Hex makes no attempt to remain faithful to the source material. It’s a shame really as the character had the potential to star in a Leone-style Spaghetti Western. The movie isn’t so much A Fistful of Dollars as it is Wild Wild West. In the pantheon of DC adaptations, it ranks at the bottom of the pile alongside Catwoman and Steel.

Rating: * ½
Posted by William D. Lee at 11:57 PM

http://moviemikes.com/2010/06/film-review-jonah-hex/

FIlm Review “Jonah Hex”

June 17, 2010 by Mike Gencarelli
Filed under Film Reviews

3 Comments

Directed by: Jimmy Hayward
Produced by: Akiva Goldsman, Andrew Lazar
Starring: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender
Studio: Warner Bros.
Running time: 75 minutes (w/o credits)

Our Score: Half star out of 4 stars

OK, first things first, I have one question. Why does all movies in the south have to take place on the Fourth of the July? Really? “Jonah Hex” starts off on the wrong foot from the its opening scene. Through an animated sequence in the beginning of the film, we view in fast forward who Jonah Hex is and what the story is about. By the time that intro is done, I was already tired of the character and the story, if that is possible. I though to myself, “Wow, they just told the whole story, what’s left?” I got an answer real quick when I found that there actually wasn’t much left after all.

“Jonah Hex” tells the brief and unclear story of a soldier turned outlaw turned bounty hunter in a very quick 75 minutes. That’s right, I said 75 minutes (without end-credits, which I did not stick around for). Honestly in that 75 minutes, I felt like it was over two hours. The story follows Jonah as he travels as a bounty hunter doing God-knows-what for really no reason. It is explained in the beginning that he watched his family die at the hands of Quentin Turnbull, played by John Malkovich. He is scarred with the letters “QT” on his face. I am guessing though he tries to remove it and he looks like he does in the movie (Anyone?!) It one of the many things that really aren’t explained well. Hex is then bent on revenge to get back at Turnbull for destroying this life. All these problems above stem from one thing: TERRIBLE EDITING. What were they thinking releasing a comic book adaption that has such a great back story into a jumpy film that barely runs over an hour.

I haven’t even got to the acting yet. Josh Brolin was so great in “No Country for Old Men” and “W.” and this was just such a weak role for him to play. John Malkovich is always great in anything especially most recently in “Burn After Reading”, but he wasn’t used to his full potential and just seemed thrown in. One of the only good parts of the movie was Michael Fassbender who played Malkovich’s henchmen. He was sharp and funny. Hmmm….let’s see did I forget anyone. Oh that’s right Megan Fox, which is because she isn’t even in the whole movie. I think if you added up all of her scenes they add up to less than 10 minutes and if you watched the trailer every scene that she is in are shown in the trailer.

As much as it pain me to speak bad about this film after actually thinking it had potential, STAY AWAY! You cannot get that 75 minutes back that you will waste in this movie. I would say wait for DVD but honestly I do not even think it is worth even that unless they come up with some ridiculous director’s unrated cut which in fact is an entirely new movie.

Just in case you need to use the bathroom during the movie check out the best time to go at RunPee.com

http://www.pretty-scary.net/content/jonah-hex-2010-1

onah Hex (2010)
Submitted by Tristan Sinns on Mon, 06/21/2010 - 12:43
Jonah HexDirected by: Jimmy Hayward
Written by: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor, and William Farmer
Cast: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett

The troubles of Jonah Hex start with his involvement with a confederate troop led by the grim Quentin Turnbull during the United States Civil War. Jonah balks at Turnbull's brutal methods and abandons the troop in such a way that it leads to the death of Turnbull's son. Turnbull gets revenge by burning Jonah's family alive and horribly maiming Jonah before leaving him tied up and left for dead. Jonah is lucky, however, and is picked up by some local Indians, who nurse him back from Death's door, and thus give him an opportunity to set out for revenge against the savagery of Quentin Turnbull.

The above may sound like the first act - it's not. This is all laid out in Jonah Hex in about two minutes as an introduction, narrated by the voice of Jonah and supported by comic strip style panel drawings. This rapid exposition ends on the note that Jonah's quest to kill Turnbull abruptly ends when he finds Turnbull has died in an unrelated hotel fire. So, with nothing else to do, Jonah becomes a bounty hunter. "But wait!" says the film ten minutes later, "Turnbull is actually alive, and the hotel fire was a ruse. Jonah restarts his quest to kill Turnbull!"

Jonah HexIf you're wondering why the film had Turnbull supposedly die in a hotel fire, only to not actually be dead at all ten minutes later, then welcome to the tone of the entire film. Jonah Hex is a mess of epic proportions; a hackneyed attempt to create a story by stitching together unrelated bits of nonsense to create a retarded Frankenstein with a 10-gallon hat. Jonah Hex, pound for pound, leaves more questions unanswered than ABC's Lost, and at a fraction of the entertainment value.

Jonah Hex's brush with death, and subsequent revival by the Indians, somehow imbues him a supernatural ability to commune with the dead. The curious part about this is why don't all the other people who nearly die, but don't, get special abilities? This was the time of the American Civil War - it's not like brushes with death were uncommon. You might have a brush with death on your way to the corner store to get some licorice. You might stumble upon a brush with death while putting on your shoes. Brushes with death, not to mention "real" death, were everywhere during this time of the nation, so much that it certainly wasn't unique or special in any way.

So, maybe it was the Indians who gave him the special powers. But why would they help him at all? And who the hell are these Indians anyway? This brush with death wasn't Jonah Hex's only brush with death - he also manages to get shot again later in the film, and somehow the same Indians show up to save him. I guess it's just what Indians did back then; wander around, pick up people who are suffering brushes with death, take them to their magical teepee, and smoke weed with them until they get back up. What a wonderful culture.

But why Jonah even had to get shot later in the film is a question all of its own. In the opening action scenes, he easily dodges bullets. A bad guy will shoot and Jonah does one of those nifty shoulder jerks, and the bullet whizzes past him, leaving him safe. He even snaps his head around as if he's watching the bullet whiz past him. Why does he forget how to dodge bullets in the third act? Maybe he missed the Indians?

But the supernatural abilities he picks up aren't enough - oh no. He also gets a couple super toys from a friendly black smith, named "Smith", who makes things like high powered horse mounted Gatling guns and wrist mounted semi-automatic crossbows that fire dynamite sticks. Why this Smith exists, just who the hell he is, and why he gives expensive doodads to Jonah are never really discussed.

Jonah HexThe most ridiculous weaponry, however, doesn't really lay on the side of Jonah. Turnbull also has his share of unexplained mega-nonsense. Somehow, he comes up with a Gatling cannon - not a Gatling gun - but a Gatling cannon. But it's not just a Gatling cannon - oh no! It fires six or so big cannon balls at a target, which just land with a kerplump and lay there, doing nothing. Then, it fires a smaller ball that looks like a radioactive orange, and when it hits, it somehow makes all the cannon balls explode, and then everything blows up and dies. This entire contraption is mounted on a giant ironclad and is loaded via a complicated mechanism of levers, gears, and ramps that would look right at home in a Bugs Bunny industrial sequence with Raymond Scott Quintette's Powerhouse as the musical score. Now - you might see this coming - they never really explain just where the hell he came up with this Gatling cannon, or where the hell he came up with the glowy balls from Krypton, or even where the hell he came up with a thousand ton ironclad to mount it on!

A special note about Megan Fox: she has the emotional range of a boiled lobster. She has three facial expressions - plain, smiling, and mildly annoyed - and she uses one of these three to fit any given situation. Most of the time she goes with "plain"; this fits 90% of all scenes in which she appears. When she's supposedly happy with her love interest, Jonah Hex, she goes with "smile". When she's wrestling with experienced killers with large knives who want to carve her guts out, she pulls the "mildly annoyed" face. That's it. That's her entire acting range. The woman's a disaster and needs to stop being in movies, at least if said movies want to stop sucking.

One of the more curious features of the script is the way it struggles to echo current world situations. Quentin Turnbull is said to be called the "Terrorista" by some, and he also uses suicide bombers with dynamite belts as shock troops. He's on a quest to destroy "America". Why his mindless drones of soldiers are still following him is another good question - yet they do, with as much stupid fervor as the Monarch's Henchmen of the Venture Brothers. There is also a vague statement about race, but the statement is as confused as the rest of the film and isn't really worth being addressed beyond pointing at it. /point.

Jonah HexThe editing of the film is thoroughly confused with many scenes feeling awkward and out of balance. The worst of these is in the showdown between Jonah and Turnbull. For some inexplicable reason, there are two showdowns - one in the "real" world that is more action and explosion oriented, and one in what I suppose is the 'Elemental Plain of Death' that is hand-to-hand melee combat. The showdown sequence is made up of rapid edits between these two separate battles. If this wasn't confusing enough, they also edit in rapid flashbacks to Turnbull burning Jonah's home and burning his face. Three sequences jumbled together, and it's hard to care about even a one. It's just a pitiable wreck.

I realize the film is meant to be rather tongue-in-cheek. This is pretty obvious at the end when Jonah is invited to be the new "Sheriff of America"; which he, of course, turns down. The problem is Jonah Hex took the tongue, pierced the cheek, and gave itself a wet willy. Howard the Duck was also tongue-in-cheek - and may have even been a better film. Consider yourself warned.

This is a Day Two Review.

http://www.laineygossip.com/Jonah_Hex_review_written_by_Sarah_21june10.aspx

Jonah Hexed

Written by Sarah

Do you believe in voodoo? I do. Call it superstition, karma, witchcraft, bad juju. I believe that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And I walked right into a black magic trap over the weekend. I went to see Jonah Hex. Willingly. I paid my $10 for Jonah Hex and in so doing I invited evil into my life. And evil arrived Sunday night in the form of the Massive Computer Meltdown of 2010. But first, about Jonah Hex.

I am struggling with the language to express just how bad this movie is. Because there was a lot wrong with this movie. An unlikeable hero, a love interest we never care about, a villain so bland he was played by John Malkovich’s Reanimated Corpse, and attempts at humor which repeatedly fell flat. Nothing illustrates a movie’s failure more than when the moment after a punchline is greeted with silence. Though it’s quite short at 73 minutes, I feel like if I sat through a longer Jonah Hex I would have started bleeding from every orifice. The writing was bad, the acting was bad, the direction was bad, the editing was criminal. The editing was so awful. What might have been decent performances from Michael Fassbender (Inglorious Basterds, the upcoming X-Men: First Class) and Will Arnett (Arrested Development) were rendered useless by having their characters cut off at the knees.

Who were these people? Why were these people? What were they supposed to be doing? What were their names? No idea on all of the above. When asked how Michael Shannon, recent Academy Award nominee for Revolutionary Road, was in the movie my answer was, “I don’t remember seeing him.” Which makes sense as he was the “Barker at the boxing match”. Michael Shannon, Oscar nominee, was reduced to being an EXTRA. And Josh Brolin, generally a good actor, was brought down by Hex’s trademark scar. It immobilized his face and unfortunately Brolin isn’t such a good actor that he can overcome the liability. What looks good in a comic book doesn’t always work on film.

The plot of Jonah Hex is irrelevant. Large chunks of it made no sense, and I can’t remember it anyway, because my brain entered a fugue state halfway through the movie to save itself from the sheer inanity of it all. The important points are that Hex can touch dead people and make them alive again, and that Hex and John Malkovich’s Reanimated Corpse are engaged in a struggle to the death because they have each murdered members of the other’s family.

Somewhere in there Hex has a relationship with a hooker (Megan Fox) who has zero impact on the story. Brolin and Fox have no chemistry and Fox can’t deliver a witticism to save her life. I spent the entire eight minutes that Fox was onscreen—for a headlining star she was barely in the movie—wondering why her face looked like it had been drawn on with CGI (probably because it had).

The fight scenes were terrible, using parkour in a way that should be punishable by the law, and Brolin and John Malkovich’s Reanimated Corpse do not have the physicality needed to sell a believable and visually interesting fight. The least a bad action movie could do is entertain me, but Jonah Hex was so far beyond bad and not entertaining that stabbing myself in the eye with chopsticks started sounding like fun before the movie was over.

Which brings us to the voodoo this movie worked over the weekend. My suspicions that there was something wrong with Jonah Hex began growing earlier this year as Warner Brothers kept delaying the release of the trailer. That’s never a good sign, especially for big-budget summer blockbuster hopefuls that rely on internet buzz to pull their audience. I knew there was something wrong with this movie, and I knew I should have gone to see Toy Story 3 instead, but I insisted on acting against my better judgment and my reward was a virus in my nerd box Sunday night that crashed my whole system and took my initial scathing review of Jonah Hex out with it. Call me superstitious and paranoid, but I’m pretty sure Jonah Hex is actually part of a voodoo ritual that brings destruction and sorrow to all who see it. Not that anyone, besides me, saw this movie. Jonah Hex barely made $5 million over the weekend, and even in the new reality, that’s plain old sh*tty box office.

http://thankyounetflix.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/jonah-hex/

Jonah Hex

PLOT:

During the American Civil War, Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) fought on the side of the Confederacy until betraying his commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) to save a hospital and killing Turnbull’s son in the process. A vengeful Turnbull and his right-hand man, Burke (Michael Fassbender), burn down Jonah’s house with his wife and son still inside and brand his face with a hot iron, leaving the initials QT; which he later removes with a red-hot hatchet resulting in his disfigured visage. Days later, Native Americans find Jonah and revive him with their mystical powers. As a result, Jonah is present among the living while also having a presence on the other side, granting him the ability to temporarily resurrect and communicate with the dead. Eventually hearing of Turnbull’s apparent death in a hotel fire, Jonah establishes himself as a legendary bounty hunter.

Jonah rides into the town of Stunk Crick and presents his latest bounty to the town marshals only to realize they had no intention of paying, but instead to kill Jonah for his own bounty. Jonah kills the marshals and several gunmen and leaves. Meanwhile, a Union train is robbed of a weapon component being transported for safekeeping. Burke blows up the train and Turnbull, alive and well, orders the component be taken to Fort Resurrection. President Grant (Aidan Quinn) is informed of the train massacre by Lieutenant Grass (Will Arnett) and surmises that Turnbull plans to attack the Union on the Fourth of July (the country’s centennial). Grass is told to find Jonah and hire him to stop Turnbull.

Jonah goes to a brothel and spends the night with Lilah (Megan Fox), a prostitute attracted to the disfigured man for more than just professional interest. As Jonah prepares to leave the next morning, Grass’s men burst in and tell Jonah that he is being conscripted into the nation’s service to track down Turnbull. Realizing his family is still unavenged, Jonah accepts. Elsewhere, Turnbull and Burke retrieve the main component of the “nation killing” weapon, an orange chemical orb developed by Eli Whitney in service of the Union.

Grass tells Jonah all that is known of Turnbull’s plans but explains that the trail went dead because their informant died. Resurrecting the informant with his powers, Jonah learns that the man hadn’t been recruited by Turnbull, but by Colonel Slocum (Tom Wopat), another associate of Jonah’s who betrayed his family. Jonah pays Slocum a visit at an illegal death match pavilion run by Doc Cross Williams (Michael Shannon). However, Slocum is corrupt and sarcastically tells Jonah to ask Turnbull’s dead son, Jeb, where his father is. Jonah throws Slocum into the fighting ring where the gladiator, a bestial, snakelike creature, attacks and kills him.

Jonah rides to Gettysburg where he spends the night digging up Jeb Turnbull (Jeffery Dean Morgan) and revives his corpse. After a brief confrontation, Jonah apologizes for killing Jeb during the Civil War. In return, Jeb tells Jonah about Fort Resurrection and then returns to the afterlife. Jonah then buys some new weaponry from Smith (Lance Reddick), a gunsmith, in preparation for battle. Smith points out that Jonah’s hatred of the Union isn’t born out of Southern loyalty but out of a stubbornness to adhere to the rules of government.

Jonah goes to the fort and encounters Turnbull but doesn’t get a chance to kill him. Jonah gets shot several times after a fight with Burke but is able to escape. As Jonah nears death and imagines what it would be like to fight Turnbull, his dog drags him to his Native American allies who perform a ceremony that heals Jonah. Back on his feet, he relays a message to Washington about Turnbull’s plan to destroy the capital. Afterwards, Turnbull tells Burke to find what Jonah loves and bring it to him as bait for Jonah; Burke kidnaps Lilah from the brothel.

Jonah sneaks through the dock where Turnbull’s Confederate ironclad is being readied for the attack. Burke attacks him and the two discreetly fight until Jonah shoves Burke headfirst into the boat motor, then utterly destroys him by burning him up. Jonah prepares to shoot Turnbull but Turnbull holds Lilah at gunpoint and forces Jonah to surrender. Turnbull chains Jonah and Lilah in the ship’s hold and tells Jonah that he wants him to watch as the Union is destroyed. Lilah picks her handcuffs and frees Jonah, who goes after Turnbull. Lt. Grass’s monitor warship engages Turnbull’s but is destroyed with the Nation Killer. Jonah and Turnbull fight and fall into the engine room. Turnbull gains the upper hand and gives the order to destroy the city. As the preliminary weapons are fired, laying the preparation for the explosive trigger, Jonah uses his tomahawk to jam the cannon. He then brutally beats Turnbull and traps his neck in a gear before saving Lilah. The pair jump into the water just as the chemical orb ignites in the engine room, killing Turnbull and all his men.

The next day, Grant rewards Jonah with a job offer as sheriff of the United States. Jonah refuses, however, but assures the President that if they need him, they’ll be able to find him.

REVIEW:

Jonah Hex isn’t exactly a household comic the way Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, etc. are. He’s more along the lines of characters such as Ghost Rider, Blade, and The Spirit, known pretty much only to those in the comic world, so it came as a bit of a surprise that they were doing a film on the disfigured bounty hunter.

I don’t know much about Hex, other than the basics, he’s a bounty hunter in post-Civil War western times. In the comics he has no powers, unlike in this film, until he becomes a Black Lantern…but that’s for a different blog and topic.

Critics have been bashing this thing left and right. After watching it this afternoon, I don’t see what the fuss is about. First of all, did they really expect a lesser character such as Hex in his first major media appearance, with the exception of one episode of Batman: The Animated Series, to deliver a strong outing worthy of the heavyweights like Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, Superman, or most recently, Iron Man? Next, it was going up against Toy Story 3! How can anything compete with a Pixar juggernaut? Let’s be real people!

Ok, so we have Jonah Hex here in his first film, but the thing that they don’t do which they should have done is give us a full out origin. I mean, with every superhero film since time began we always get that origin tale. Jonah Hex gives us a bit of it, then goes into some weird half animated flashback-esque sequence to sort of move the story along. I guess that should have been the tip-off about how the rest of the film as going to go, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The plot isn’t the best, and as I said, if they would have just made this an origin tale, it could have been much better. This whole scheme to blow up Washington because of what was going on at the time seemed a bit cheesy. That may be because it is a ploy that has been done time and time again in some form or another. I would have much rather have seen a bit more of Hex’s origin, culminating in some sort of better contrived revenge on Turnbull, but that’s just me.

In my review of Transporter 3, I complained about how the action took a backseat to the plot. We have another case of that here, but not as bad. I think, though, it is more related to the way the trailer made this film look. You expect butt kicking, guns a-blazin’ kick-assness, but just don’t get it. There are a couple of good action sequences complete with stuff blowing up, but it just feels like the filmmakers didn’t want to let this go the route of a true Western, and instead opted to just mellow out and hover above the drama aspect. That decision may have been the ultimate downfall of this film.

I mention earlier that this flick jumped all around in its brief origin animated sequence. Well, that sort of pacing is pretty much how the entire film moves along. Just as it seems they’re going to settle down and move with something, they jump to something else. For example, Turnbull gets this weapon set up and nearly kills Hex, then all of a sudden, we get this weird flashback/dream sequence of Hex coming up from the ground fighting Turnbull, then it moves to Megan Fox getting kidnapped. WTF?!?

Jonah Hex, in the comics, has no powers, especially being able to bring people back from the dead. However, even though they strayed from the source material, which is something I hate, it was kind of cool, especially the whole burning the longer he keeps them alive and the fresher dead meat burning faster. Purists can bitch and moan about that all they want, they have a right. After all, it’s not like I don’t have my share of complaints with the Transformers movies, but in my opinion, the bringing dead back to life was a cool addition…even if it did make me a bit nostalgic for Pushing Daisies.

Josh Brolin does a great job as Jonah. I really don’t have anything to say about his performance. He plays Hex the way I would expect Hex to be if he were a real person, though I kind of wish he were bit easier to understand, but at the same time, if half your face were scarred up like that, I bet it’d be hard to understand you, too. Now that I think about it, Hex’s face is sort of like that old baseball coach on The Cleveland Show.

John Malkovich is his usual odd self here and like Brolin does a great job in the role. As Quentin Turnbull, he is able to murder without showing the least bit of remorse and as he’s trying to destroy the Union, he seems as if he doesn’t care about anything but proving the South is right.

Michael Fassbender doesn’t really have any major lines to speak of, but this would not have been the same without him. As the psychotic right hand to Turnbull, Blake, Fassbender brings a twisted character to the screen that may very well have been one of the best parts of the film.

I’m sure the hormone driven guys that read this are going to hate this next section, but it has got to be said. MEGAN FOX CANNOT ACT AND WAS NOT NEEDED IN THIS FILM!!!! Yeah, that’s right, she was nothing more than a name to get horny guys to go see this. She didn’t bring anything to the table. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if a woman is in a corset, aren’t things pushed up and accentuated? Fox didn’t seem to have those qualities here. I don’t blame the notion of casting her, but it would have worked much better with someone like Monica Bellucci, since she’s played characters like this before. Perhaps Dita von Teese, since she pretty much lives in corsets. Hell, I could have done a better job acting than Fox. She seriously needs to take some acting lessons, or go back to school because folks are starting to pick up that she can’t act, and her looks aren’t going to last forever. Speaking of which, there was something odd about the way she looked here. It was like they poured some kind of plastic over here. She resembled a living Barbie Doll. It may have just been the lighting, but it was weird.

So, are the critics right about this film? No. They are right about certain aspects, but this is nowhere near as bad they make it out to be. I have said on more than one occasion that critics are out of touch with what real people want to see. If you want further proof of this, look at the films over the past couple years that they have given good ratings to and the one that people actually went to see. There is a bit of a disconnect there.

I didn’t love this film, but I will definitely be buying the DVD. Should you go out and see this in theaters? Well, it’ll be cheaper than seeing Toy Story 3, but I can’t say if it’ll be worth it. For me, I found it to be a perfect Saturday afternoon matinée flick. From what I hear the older generation say, this is what most Westerns were, anyway, so that works. I recommend it, but be warned some of you may not like and others may love it. Your taste will ultimately decide what you think about the finished product.

4 out of 5 stars

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

http://carlosdev.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/jonah-hex/

Jonah Hex

You have to wonder if Josh Brolin didn't just take a blowtorch to his career.

(Warner Brothers) Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Michael Shannon, Tom Wopat, Aidan Quinn, Wes Bentley, John Gallagher Jr., Julia Jones, Luke James Fleischmann, Rio Hackford, Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Directed by Jimmy Hayward

We all have a reason to get up out of bed every morning. Be it love, career or cause, there is something that motivates us to keep going even when the going gets rough. For some that cause is vengeance.

Jonah Hex (Brolin) was an officer in the Confederate Army under the command of General Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich) but when the General ordered the burning of a hospital with innocent women and children inside it. Jonah balks at this and betrays Turnbull to the Union Army. As a result of this, Hex is forced to kill Jeb Turnbull (Morgan), the son of the General.

As you might guess, the General doesn’t cotton to this very well. He finds Jonah and ties him to a cross, then makes him watch as he burns Jonah’s wife and son to death. That General Turnbull, he sure has a thing for burning women and children alive. Just in case Jonah forgets who is responsible for the death of his family, General puts a branding iron on the side of Jonah’s face while the General’s Irish right hand man Burke (Fassbender) holds him down.

Jonah is left on the cross to die, but was rescued by members of the Crow nation whose medicine men were able to bring back Jonah to this side. Jonah came back hideously scarred but with the ability to converse with the dead. That comes in handy since the dead can see where those they trafficked with in life are.

Jonah becomes a bounty hunter but after killing a corrupt mayor and his sheriff in the lovely mining town (if you can really call it that) of Stunk Crick, he finds himself with a bounty on his own head. Naturally, he does what any self-respecting bounty hunter would do in a situation like that – go visit a prostitute with a heart of gold, namely the fetching Lilah (Fox) who carries a torch for Jonah. She also carries a derringer and a knife. She may have a heart of gold but she’s also practical.

Their rendezvous is interrupted by about a dozen Union soldiers (Jonah’s withering bon mot – “How many men are you seein’ today?”) who get Jonah’s co-operation by telling him three words; Quentin Turnbull’s alive.

You see, everybody had assumed that Turnbull had perished in a hotel fire but it turns out that he had faked his death. You’d think someone able to communicate with the dead would have better intel about who had passed on and who hadn’t. In any case, the U.S. Army had determined that Turnbull was assembling a superweapon designed by Eli Whitney, inventor of the Cotton Gin and was planning to use it against the United States on the occasion of its Centennial celebration. President Ulysses Grant (Quinn) thinks that Jonah Hex is the best bet at stopping that wacky General, who not only likes to burn women and children but sure can’t let go of a grudge. Can someone who has cheated death so often do so once again?

I really wanted to love this movie, and I had high hopes that I would. After all, Josh Brolin has been hot as of late, with terrific performances in No Country for Old Men, W. And Milk all increasing his bankability as an actor. This looked to create his genre profile and maybe put a franchise character under his belt.

Alas, it is not to be. While the script writers Neveldine and Taylor are some of the most innovative action film writers in the business (they wrote and directed both Crank films), they missed the mark here. Early on there’s a nifty animated sequence, and the dead guy interrogation sequences are pretty cool, but this feels slopped together. The heavy metal score gives it a kind of steampunk feel but the doomsday weapon, which features a kind of rotating cannon firing device that shoots big iron balls that are detonated by an orange glowing bocce ball, is nonsensical and not really impressive.

As kind of an aside, I think there’s a trend here that any movie that depicts Ulysses Grant as president turns into a major bomb – first there was The Legend of the Lone Ranger, then the misfire that was the remake of Wild, Wild West and now the box office receipts for this one were anemic. Screenwriters, take note.

Brolin does a credible enough job as Hex, mainly having to squint, snarl and drawl his lines in a Clint Eastwood-esque rasp. You get a sense of his pain and his violent nature, and while Neveldine and Taylor do try to give Hex a bit of backstory, Brolin’s narration gives us more insight into the character than we might have had otherwise.

Malkovich is a capable villain, although this is probably not his best bad guy role (that would be In the Line of Fire) and Fox is easy enough on the eyes in her Victorian boudoir fashions that she wears throughout.

There are lots of explosions – most of the budget seems to have gone to pyro. It’s a shame we didn’t see more story here. The movie clocks in at a mere 81 minutes, so there was room for more exposition but I get the impression that story was sacrificed for pacing here.

Jonah Hex comes from the realm of DC Comics and I find it somewhat surprising that the powers-that-be at DC have elected to greenlight a film about what has to be characterized as one of their minor characters over better-known characters such as Wonder Woman, the Flash and the Teen Titans, none of which have had a chance to shine on the big screen as of yet. Given the talent both in front of and behind the camera, I would have expected a better movie than the one we got here, which does little to establish DC Comics as a player in Hollywood the way Marvel Comics is. It’s too bad; the story of Jonah Hex is a compelling one and with a little more focus, this could have been a really good movie instead of a mediocre one.

REASONS TO GO: The movie isn’t as bad as you heard it is.

REASONS TO STAY: It’s still a mess. Story seems to have been sacrificed at the altar of pacing.

FAMILY VALUES: A good deal of violence, a little bit of bad language and a little bit of sexual innuendo. Okay for teens but probably not for much younger than that.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Along with veteran film composer Marco Beltrami, heavy metal band Mastodon composed the film’s score.

HOME OR THEATER: Chances are this will be gone from theaters by next weekend but quite frankly it’ll look a lot better on the big screen than the small.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

TOMORROW: Burma VJ

http://filmsmell.com/?p=542


Jonah Hex (35/100)

jonahhex_poster_mWARNING: This movie has the word BUSTLE in it.

Westerns should be easy. Comic westerns should be even easier. A guy’s family is murdered by a psychopath vigilante and he loses everything. Near death, a token Native American tribe saves him so now he’s a real badass focused on revenge. I don’t really need more bells and whistles beyond that.

Somehow Jonah Hex got way more complicated, yet less interesting. I was actually a little bored watching this movie. Different from the comic, they added in the concept that Jonah Hex could talk to the dead. I actually liked that twist and those supernatural scenes were the only interesting ones in the movie for me.

I think a major reason this movie blew is because it was forced into a PG-13 frame. With a proper R horizon, this could have included the violence and western-grit it really needed. I mean, if sociopathic John Malkovich murders your family, he doesn’t do it by saying, “WATCH THIS! “….and then we watch nothing but fire and a door slam. I really want to reference CON-AIR here, but it’s too soon.

Josh Brolin does his best, and is the only one to pull off the southern accent. (Johnnyboy Malkovich doesn’t even try. Not even a twang, not even a “ya’ll” for good measure even though he’s some huge confederate general.) Don’t give Brolin too much credit though. If you hold your lips up on one side like he had to with the burn scar makeup and say “I’m Jonah Hex. I like to throw axes and be emotionally unavailable to whores…”, you will find that the accent comes naturally. I’m not sure what was up with Michael Fassbender’s accent. It sounded weird, but I know he’s actually Irish so I just let it go. I would have liked to have seen more tattooed-guy knife fighting, but instead he just twirls it around and grins. And Megan Fox. Well, her acting is so terrible, of course. BETCH better get on her knees and start blowing Optimus Prime to get that Transformers 3 gig back.

Because the wrongdoings and venegance are watered-down so terribly, the audience never really starts to give a s$#! about what happens. Couple that with a poor script, lots of random fiery explosives (LOTS), and weird/lack of screen chemistry between actors and you have yet another comic-to-movie failfest. Ballhorns.

I wish I could have told you this movie was HEXellent, but it was HEXtarded. Please let me know when you recover from those hideous puns. I’ll be praying for you. (35/100)

cyrusmalkovich

http://kfeliz.blogspot.com/2010/06/capsule-reviews-get-him-to-greek-jonah.html

Jonah Hex: First of all, this movie is quick, like ABC Family original movie quick. So, do NOT see it unless you get an under-$6 ticket price. Despite this fact, and perhaps because of it and the absolutely s$#! reviews this film had, I had NO expectations going into it. I think that helped my overall take on the film, because truthfully, I enjoyed it. The base-plot reminded me heavily of Ghost Rider from a few years back, however I would pick Hex over Ghost Rider any day and I OWN Ghost Rider. Josh Brolin and John Malkovich carry the film, though Will Arnett, Aiden Quinn, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and a barely recognizable Michael Fassbender add a nice layer of depth to the film. Generally it's a good-guy-does-right-thing-pays-for-it-only-lives-for-vengeance type story, but it has elements of comedy and fairly decent action. Also, Megan Fox is GOOD in this movie. She doesn't have a lot of screen time, but I really found her worthwhile despite the limited ground she had to cover. If you enjoy action and/or vengeance movies you will enjoy this flick. It's worth it JUST for the guns and the wicked nation-killer weapon.
Posted by KFeliz Reviews at 8:40 PM

http://newsmanone.blogspot.com/2010/06/movie-review-jonah-hex.html

Saturday, June 26, 2010
Movie Review: Jonah Hex
5. I read an interview by one of the creators of the "Jonah Hex" movie in which he said it would be impossible to pace this Western to match the great spaghetti Westerns because studios would never distribute it.

4. I'm guessing the reason for that is they don't think such a movie would make any money in the hyperbolic modern marketplace, which defies logic as the so-called "Man With No Name" trilogy still rakes in cash with multiple cable and satellite TV airings and DVD and Blu Ray sales.

3. Nonetheless, "Jonah Hex" makers decided to go with something to benefit the attention deficiet disorder generation — a godawful annoyance that attempts to be a parable about terrorism, the Obama Administration and a whole bunch of other stuff that is even dumber than it sounds.

2. This movie is a waste of the talented Josh Brolin, who plays scarred bounty hunter Hex, goofball actor John Malkovich, who plays a villain with bad hair, and, heck, it's even a waste of all-jiggle-no-act Megan Fox, who manages to be unconvincing as a prostitute.

1. "Jonah Hex" is based on a DC comic book from the 1970s that was clearly derivatives of Clint Eastwood Western archatypes and if the mopes who made this film could've taken anything from the source material — or even Westerns — it should've been the old addage: "Dance with the girl that brung ya."

===============
"Jonah Hex"
Run time: 1 hour, 21 minutes
Rated PG-13
Genre: Action-Adventure-Drama-Suspense-Thriller‎
Director: Jimmy Hayward
Cast: Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Michael Fassbender
Finney's Flicks Grade: D-
Posted by Daniel P. Finney at 10:06 PM

http://normalguysviews.blogspot.com/2010/06/movie-review-jonah-hex.html

Sunday, June 27, 2010
Movie Review: Jonah Hex


Jonah Hex. Raise your hand if you've read the comic book!......Me neither. I have a friend who is a diehard fan though, and he was very nervous walking into this flick. Seems Jonah's not supposed to be able to raise the dead, like he does in the movie. You're also not supposed to know the origin of her scar...and his family was never killed, causing him to go on a quest for vengeance...uh-oh. Movies that deviate that much from the source material are very rarely good.

Plot: Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), is a hero during the Civil War, who turns in his old commander, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), when he starts to do decidedly anti-social acts following the war. Killing Turnbull's son in the process, Hex is hunted down by Turnbull, and forced to watch his family get killed, before Turnbull permanently scars his face. Hex goes looking for Turnbull, but hears reports he died in a fire. With nothing left to live for, Hex becomes a bounty hunter, with a score of arrest warrants in his wake. However, when the U.S. military hears Turnbull is actually alive and committing robberies to build a super-weapon, they turn to Hex to stop Turnbull before it's too late.

This film was alright, though there are some problems. The first problem is the run time - 70 minutes. Really kind of short. Really too short, in my humble opinion, to make a really strong movie, with multi-dimensional characters who you care about. See the problem of having such a short runtime? I mean, I'm all for cutting the fat out of movies (believe me, there's a lot of fat in movies), but I'm also not a big fan of the bare bones minimum, and I feel with Jonah Hex, I got the bare bones minimum. Which is a shame because I was really digging what I saw.

Then there's, the characters. Turnbull is the standard baddie. He does evil things, because he is upset with the United States. Why? Don't know. I think it may have had something to do with the South losing the Civil War, but don't quote me. Obviously, it didn't make a great impression with me. Then there's Megan Fox. She's a prostitute who loves Jonah Hex. Once again, why? I mean, he's pretty ugly, thanks to his scar, and it's not like he's stable, he's running off killing a bad guy all the time! Why love him? Beats me. She loves him, that's it. Okay. Then there's all these other characters who I know: Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, Wes Bentley, Michael Shannon, Aidan Quinn, Jeffrey Dean Morgan...do any of these guys play memorable characters? Not really. Quinn is the President of the United States, so he's very officious, and Morgan comes the closest, as Turnbull's dead son briefly reanimated by Hex (but then again, I'm a Jeffrey Dean Morgan fan from his stint on Supernatural), so no, there's a lot of actors, but not a lot for them to do.

I will say that Brolin does shine as Hex, and is perhaps what saves the movie from being crap. He handles every situation with aplomb and his own cynical, dark humour that is really entertaining to see. If you're doing a movie with such a prominent lead character, you have to hope he's interesting and Hex is interesting to follow around. He has these neat powers, and he's a badass, he just doesn't give a damn anymore, he just does what he wants, and what he thinks is right. I don't necessarily think they needed to explain the man's origin or anything, considering that there was so much the movie did not delve into, so it is sort of weird they went to pains to explain how he got the scar, for instance, but in the end, Brolin and his character saves the movie.

So, this is a fun time-waster, but nothing more. I think they could have done more, especially with the character, and especially with Brolin, but considering the state of Hollywood these days, I'm not overly surprised.

Rating 3 out of 5 stars.
Posted by Headline Author at 3:16 PM

http://whatsupmovement.blogspot.com/2010/06/jonah-hex.html

Sunday, June 27, 2010
Jonah Hex

If you’re familiar with this blog or me at all you know that I tend to cling on to the positive aspects of films and come out of the theater liking most efforts. The majority of people would say I rate films too high in almost every case and I’m ok with being overly optimistic in these instances. However, once in awhile I run into something in which I just can’t find the bright side. Enter DC Comics adaption, Jonah Hex.

The concept is not the main issue with the film. Josh Brolin stars as the title character who uses his bounty hunter skills to track down a terrorist, played by John Malkovich, who is trying to blow up the post Civil War United States. Hex also has some super-natural powers and that terrorist happened to burn His family alive. Now where to start? Malkovich played his usually creepy self in a role that lacked any kind of dimension. He was a Confederate who wanted to destroy the Union… literally destroy the Union, as in blow it up with a giant cannon. The issue with developing an evil mastermind is that the film has to convince the audience someone would want to go about their evil plan. In this case, so many innocent civilians were murdered with no plan to impact the overall scheme I just couldn’t buy it.

Josh Brolin’s performance was fine. That’s really all that can be said because almost everything out of his mouth was a campy one-liner. I know better than to blame that on the actor instead of the screenwriter. Though no amount of script doctors could have saved Megan Fox’s performance. The prostitute, Lilah, that she played was not important to the story and did nothing except bring a woman into the fold. Yeah fine, Megan Fox is hot blah, blah, blah but she is a very weak actress. Her poor southern drawl came and went multiple times and the complete absence of chemistry with Brolin created a number of very awkward scenes. To draw a comparison, it was like if Alfred and Two Face started making out during The Dark Knight… exactly. Michael Fassbender’s over the top performance as Burke, the Irish henchman was a rare bright spot, and deserves to be mentioned.

The last of my major complaints comes with the glancing over of certain aspects of the film that could have strengthened it. One of the early scenes is animated with comic book style graphics. But that one scene was the only time. The theme doesn’t even return for the credits. It was as if the director forgot to film that sequence and decided it would be cheaper to draw it. That obviously didn’t happen but that’s what it looked like. The other theme was Hex’s ability to rouse the dead. It was one of the few unique elements in the film, but it’s hardly used. I guess Jonah Hex is just another reminder that all comic books shouldn’t be made into movies. I don’t want to dissuade potential viewers from seeing it however. It’s the best Post-Civil War-Sci Fi-Apocolyptic thriller since 1999’s Wild Wild West. (4.3 out of 10)
Posted by W^M at 6/27/2010 05:40:00 PM

http://crowesmostlymovies.blogspot.com/2010/06/jonah-hex.html

Sunday, June 27, 2010
Jonah Hex

I can only assume that at some point studio executives took a look at Jonah Hex, shook their heads, and decided America wasn't ready for a political allegory wrapped inside of a movie based on a second-tier DC Comics character. The resulting 80-minute version probably isn't some kind of mangled classic but is just crazy enough to pique my curiosity. My attempt to get "Jonah Hex Justifications" going on Twitter was just a ruse; Jonah Hex is the kind of movie one sees with the hope it might be a turkey for the ages.

The basics: Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is left for dead by his commanding officer Col. Turnbull (John Malkovich) after refusing to participate in the war crimes of his Confederate Army Company and killing Turnbull's son. (Cheers if you can figure that out from the opening montage) Rescued by Indians, Hex is revived and granted the ability to talk to the dead. Scarred by Turnbull's brand, he's operating as a bounty hunter when found by the U.S. Army (Will Arnett is offbeat casting as an officer). It seems Turnbull, thought dead, is staging a series of terrorist attacks with the ultimate goal of bringing down the U.S. Government during the Centennial celebration. Turnbull and his forces have the goal of the Tea Party (tearing down the established order with no subsequent plan) and use the methods of Al Qaeda, though the superweapon they use looks like something from a steampunk era episode of Alias. John Malkovich however has the goal of cashing a check and uses the method of phoning it in. It's a tired, lazy performance and I could have sworn there were a couple of scenes where we were actually looking at some kind of Malkovich-like Muppet. Malkovich aside, the cast is the best thing about Jonah Hex. I wanted to spend a little more time with Michael Fassbender's smiling killer and Lance Reddick's purveyor of jacked-up weaponry. Then there's Megan Fox as the prostitute who can bring out Jonah's softer side. Even less is asked of Fox here than in Jennifer's Body, if that's possible. While I would have liked to have seen her and everyone else try to make Jonah Hex a little more fun, I deeply resent the "Can this career be saved?" whispers following Fox around the web. She's in the movie for 10-12 minutes tops, and no one seems too worried about Josh Brolin's career.

Jonah Hex finally descends into madness. Is director Jimmy Hayward really cutting between two different scenes of Malkovich and Brolin fighting in different locations? Yes, he is. Michael Shannon is allegedly playing a character called "Doc Cross Williams". Can you find him? I couldn't. Why did anyone want Jonah Hex to be made? I don't know.
Posted by Simon Crowe at 12:37 PM

http://totalscifionline.com/reviews/5199-jonah-hex

Posted on Monday 28 June 2010
Jonah Hex

Directed by Jimmy Hayward
Starring Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich, Michael Fassbender
Release date Out now (US); 3 September 2010 (UK)

A Confederate soldier is given the opportunity to get revenge on the crazed commander who killed his family…

A melange of The Wild, Wild West’s anachronistic technology, Solomon Kane’s debt to Spaghetti Westerns and the less-than-subtle Con Air, Jonah Hex is a mess from start to finish.

Beginning with a potted history that, for no apparent reason, becomes an animated sequence partway through, it has pretensions of being arty (there are symbolic battles between Josh Brolin’s Hex and John Malkovich’s mad former general) but doesn’t succeed in being either a good comic book movie or a decent Western.

The prosthetic alters Brolin’s mouth so much that you need subtitles to understand what he’s saying. Malkovich is as loony in this as he is as Cyrus the Virus in Con Air, with little to make him two-dimensional, let alone three. The best one can say about Megan Fox’s performance is that it shows she’s got good legs. As for everyone else, they’re given dire dialogue to say, and in many cases seem to phone in their performance.

Hex has the ability to talk to the dead, and there are a couple of good moments in those sequences, but this is one minor comic book character who should have remained in the four-colour pages. Paul Simpson

VERDICT: 2/10
Avoid: its 81 minute running time is 82 minutes too long.

http://armchairc.blogspot.com/2010/06/jonah-hex.html

Monday, June 28, 2010
Jonah Hex
As is befitting its mangled protagonist, Jonah Hex is the cinematic equivalent of the winner of one of those Ugliest Dog competitions. It is a film that has slipped in and out of development hell so many times that it knows more about damnation than its half-dead hero, and my favorite tidbit on its Wikipedia page reads that the film is "very loosely based" on the original DC comic book of the same name. Subject to rewrites, multiple crew changes and, ultimately, pure indifference, Jonah Hex achieves a ludicrousness of execution so hysterical that you'll spend at least a portion of the time in the theater waiting for Nicolas Cage to make an appearance.

Originally set to be directed by that dastardly duo, Neveldine and Taylor, the insane team behind the Crank movies, Jonah Hex fell apart once when producers, purportedly under the guidance of star Josh Brolin, decided not to hire the action anarchists. The crew did, however, keep Neveldine & Taylor's screenplay, effectively firing the only two people who could possibly have shot the thing. Perhaps reasoning that only someone with experience in animation could handle the cartoony nature of the pair's writing -- a not altogether stupid line of thought -- producers Akiva Goldsman and Andrew Lazar brought Pixar, Fox and Blue Sky employee Jimmy Hayward, whose biggest previous credit was co-directing Horton Hears a Who!, to helm the picture.

What results is a catastrophic mash-up of audiovisual styles, mixing hillbilly, heavy metal, supernatural and Western tropes into the weirdest rip-off of The Outlaw Josey Wales you ever did see. There is always a certain joy in watching a film that does not play by the rules, that does not even seem to own a copy of the rulebook, but Jonah Hex contains all the transgressions present in Neveldine & Taylor's other works without the sense of self-awareness that they bring to those films; sketchy and vague as the pair's supposed satiric elements are, they at least give the impression that they know what they're doing deep down. With someone else trying to make heads or tails of their material, however, it's a miracle a film emerged at all, and I suppose it's not all that shocking that Wild Wild West as scored by the prog-sludge metal band Mastodon was the product.

Expository dialogue gets a bad rap, and Jonah Hex shows why, playing most of the first 5-10 minutes of an 81-minute movie (including credits) with either a voiceover narration or hysterically stilted lines spoken by characters on-screen. We see the titular hero (Brolin), a Confederate officer whose crisis of conscious led to the death of his friend, the son of his commanding officer, General Turnbull (John Malkovich), being tortured by the general. Turnbull murders Hex's family in retribution and brands Hex's face with his initials. Abruptly, the film cuts to animation -- why do so many comic movies use panel-like animation now? We know that these films are based on comic books -- jumping over the development of strange, supernatural powers and Hex's evolution into a bounty hunter as Brolin delivers the voiceover in the same slurred mumble he uses elsewhere due to the prosthetic makeup of Hex's facial scarring. By the time Hex growls, "This here's my story" when the film finally gets moving, he's told us so much we feel like the damn thing's halfway over.

It only gets worse from there. Hex's weaponry occasionally broaches steampunk territory, with horse-mounted Gatling guns and crossbow pistols that fling sticks of dynamite in an oddly straight path (no, seriously), all of which are provided by Reconstruction-era Q-substitute Smith (Lance Reddick), a freeman. (Smith lets us know that Hex's Confederate ties are not a source of contention, taking the time in the middle of conversation to randomly insert a comment that he knew Hex "ain't never believe in slavery.") For the most part, however, Hex uses traditional weapons. After all, it's weird enough that he can revive dead people by touching them.

That's what makes Jonah Hex loop around from terrible to hilarious: this is not a film that satisfies itself with merely killing someone once. No, bring 'em back for Round Two! Hex brings corpses back to life to interrogate them, yet this act of temporary resurrection for some reason causes the flesh of the reanimated being to burn and disintegrate. Once he's gotten what he needs, Hex kills them again. Matching the double-death scenario in sheer lunacy is the apparent need for no place shown on-screen to be left unexploded, and the almost casual way that Hex starts a fire in some places almost as if checking off an item on a to-do list shows where all of the film's $50 million dollar budget went.

No, wait, it gets even better. In some woefully misguided attempt to give this picture relevance, Turnbull is made into an anarchic anti-government wingnut, whom his Mexican slaves call "El Terrorista." I briefly wondered if this idea would have been expanded into a clearer slam against those good ol' boys who continue to wave their Confederate flags around and still claim to be ardent patriots, then I remembered what film I was watching. Turnbull decides to take down the country on the Fourth of July by building a secret "Nation Killer" weapon designed by Eli Whitney -- pause for dialogue about Whitney's history as the inventor of the cotton gin and father of the American Industrial Revolution -- to bring down Washington D.C. Did I mention that Will Arnett shows up as a Union soldier sporting a mustache and his deep "Michael!" voice from Arrested Development, and everyone acts if we're meant to take him seriously?

Oh, but I'll stop simply listing all the absurdities, much as I could entertain myself to no end pointing them all out. Jonah Hex, with its 73 non-credits minutes, has a lack of clear direction despite its clear revenge narrative. Most characters exist for no real reason, such as Michael Fassbender's Irish henchman named who-cares, made up in a tattoo that stretches out of his clothes and up his neck so that we might identify him among the other nondescript thugs flanking Turnbull. Both Malkovich and Brolin are slumming it, though Malkovich, who always figures out when he's on the set of something that will turn out to be a piece of garbage, goes into Maximum Malk Mode and may be the only person here playing the drama for comedy intentionally.

And Megan Fox, poor Megan Fox. I've waffled so often on how I feel about her that I just do not know what to make of her. Placed in the role of the tough prostitute/love interest Lilah, a name Brolin amusingly cannot say with his prosthetic disfigurement, for the same reason she found herself in the Transformers movies, Fox merely has to sit about and look pretty, occasionally kicking some butt so that she might look pretty whilst kicking butt. Her character serves nearly no purpose save the inevitable damsel scenario, and even those who trip over their tongues at the sight of Fox will be wondering why the hell the action breaks to jump back to her brothel room where little of consequence happens.

Despite it all, Jonah Hex reaches such a memorable level of badness, and is so mercifully short, that I enjoyed myself far more than I did any of the other summer action movies so far. There were clearly some high intentions in this film, as evidenced in its sly references, from lifting the giant cannon on the train from Buster Keaton's classic The General to the glow of the suitcase contents in Pulp Fiction -- maybe that "QT" Turnbull branded Hex with has a secondary meaning? -- and the talent involved, but something went horribly, laughably wrong. It figures that I should have this reaction, perfectly balanced between dislike of the film's clear failure and enjoyment of the ensuing train wreck, with a movie written by Neveldine & Taylor, whose Crank: High Voltage engendered a fair stronger iteration of the same reaction. Jonah Hex is as stupid as a film made by smart people can be, but if I laughed, even in a way that that the filmmakers did not intend, then who am I to pan it? Oh, indulge me for a moment as I break my promise to stop listing the inanities for one final tidbit: when Turnbull rides up the Potomac with his super-cannon, the viewfinder that targets Washington uses not crosshairs or the like but an actual outline of the Capitol building, presumably so his ignorant ex-Confederate subordinates know which building to aim at. Magnificent.
Posted by Jake at 8:50 PM

http://damrb.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/jonah-hex-lonely-devil-review/


Jonah Hex (Lonely Devil Review)
June 29, 2010
tags: DC comics, Megan Fox, Jonah Hex, Josh Brolin, John Malkovich
by Joe Wilhelm
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Unlike my fellow colleague Jonathan, I went into seeing Jonah Hex without reading any of the DC Comics that the movie is based on. As everyone can tell, the going trend in Hollywood currently is to make movies based on comics or remakes in general. After seeing the previews I liked the premise here and lets face it, I’m a sucker for action and eye candy never hurts.

Jimmy Hayward directed this movie adaption here with a quick running time of 80 minutes which is very short for an average movie. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were the writers involved into making the story fit for the big screen. The story here is quite simple actually but with a few twists thrown in. Josh Brolin plays the title character bent on revenge for the killing of his wife and son at the hands of the villainous Quentin Turnbull played by John Malkovich.

A face only Megan Fox could love.

Along for the ride in this western with a horror story element are Will Arnett (in a meaningless role) and the highlight to the film, Michael Fassbender. Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, 300) plays a sadistic knife-welding henchman who steals the scenes he is in. I’m still curious why an Irish henchman has a tribal tattoo running up his neck, but there are plenty of other things here that leave you more dumbfounded. The big talk leading up to the movie’s premiere has been Megan Fox and her 18″ corset. It makes sense for the filmmakers to try to distract everyone from her complete lack of acting ability, but with her previous film work we already know that fact.

The film is decent enough if it is on cable and nothing really else to watch. Therefor as the devil’s advocate I give Jonah Hex 2 pitchforks.

2 pitchforks

I tried to see the bright sides of this film but they are too few and far between. This movie suffers from not only bad acting but editing and directing. Brolin and Malkovich hit career lows here. Plus there are so many cut scenes that get annoying quickly. Just as we are to see the fate of characters, the scene is cut to another view and we are lead to believe the fates through sound effects and reactions from other characters. The intention was to build suspense but falls flat and is repeated throughout the film. Other scenes were not only poor but confusing and out-of-place. The concept of him talking to the dead works well in the comic realm but here doesn’t.

One can play a drinking game watching this. Every time a character calls out Jonah Hex’s name, take a shot. Even Barney from The Simpsons won’t last long. Bottom line, when we get to our “Worst of 2010″ lists, Jonah Hex will have a few nominees from me.

1/2 pitchfork

http://littlejunkies.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/unplug-this/

Jonah Hex: Mild mild west

More like Jonah Sux–I think the whole of the Confederate Army simultaneously rolled over in their graves. I didn’t necessarily have high hopes, but they did have a supporting cast list that made my heart soar: Will Arnett, Wes Bentley, Michael Fassbender, Papa Winchester, Aidan Quinn, that dude from Fringe…but in the end it just felt like nothing. The only people that looked like they were working for their paycheck bit the dust (come on kids, we’re either going to have accents or we’re not. You can’t change your mind halfway through). And, I’m sorry, but “the sheriff of America?!” Whoever wrote that or didn’t edit it out should be slapped. I will say that the only joy I got from watching this movie was giggling like a twelve year old when a mustachioed Arnett–in total sincerity–proclaimed “I have the best unit.”

http://www.fwweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3741:film-shorts&catid=62:shorts&Itemid=389

Jonah Hex (PG-13) This sci-fi Western starts out promisingly before giving way to a rushed, oddly truncated ending. Josh Brolin plays an Old West bounty hunter whose near-death experience left him scarred in the face and able to talk to the dead for short periods of time. Director Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears a Who!) comes up with some inventive visuals in the opening stages of in his live-action debut, but after that it’s just standard CGI-enhanced thriller stuff and listless banter between Brolin and Megan Fox’s hooker. Inglourious Basterds’ Michael Fassbender comes up aces as a singing Irish killer, but he’s not enough to make this worth the ticket price. Also with John Malkovich, Michael Shannon, Will Arnett, Wes Bentley, Tom Wopat, and Aidan Quinn.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/prince-of-persia-surprisingly-exciting-jonah-hex-interminable

I wish I could say the same for Jonah Hex (2010), a supernatural-tinged western based on the DC Comics cult favorite. Jimmy Hayward makes the directing leap from animated (the wonderful Horton Hears a Who) to live-action, and fails to hold on to the reins tightly enough (no pun intended). Hex has the feel of a film with too many market research fingerprints all over it, striving to be all things to all people.

A waxy-faced Megan Fox (her complexion looks digitally corrected) is there for the undersexed hormonal contigent; Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) is there for the cinema "street cred" set; and Oscar nominee Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men) is woefully miscast as bounty hunter Hex: too short, stocky, and with a Karl Childers vocal inflection (the comic book cowboy was always meant to be a darker takeoff on the amoral Eastwood "Man with No Name" persona). More Wild Wild West than Blood Meridian, or even Lonesome Dove (to name a few of the comic book's literary cohorts), Jonah Hex is the longest 81 minutes I've ever had to sit through a movie. To be forced to see the same stock shot of Brolin riding a horse ad infinitum only makes it more torturous.

http://here-halfway-there.ca/archives/840

At The Movies – Jonah Hex
July 2nd, 2010 by Paul Ungar

I almost had to drag myself to the theatre to go see this one. From the first time I saw the trailer I did nothing but cringe every time I heard the name Jonah Hex. As the release date neared, the trailers increased. Finally I broke down and decided to go and see it, but only for the purpose of keeping you, the viewer, informed. Is Jonah Hex magically good, or does this movie belong on the other side?

Jonah Hex is the newest addition to the wave of DC related media. During the American Civil War, Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) fought for the Conferderacy under his commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich). However, Jonah betrays Turnbull in order to save a hospital that Turnbull ordered destroyed, but in the process Turnbull’s son is killed. Vengeful, Turbull and his right-hand man, Burke (Michael Fassbender), show up at Jonah’s house and burn down his house with his wife and child still inside. Afterwards, Turnbull brands Jonah’s face. This results in his disfigured face. Days later, he is discovered by Native Americans and is revived by mystical powers. This causes Jonah to have a presence both in the land of the living and the dead granting him special abilites. After he hears about the death of Turnbull in a fire, Jonah becomes a bounty hunter in the American West.

The Good

My parents always told me that if I didn’t have anything good to say, you probably shouldn’t say anything. If that was the case there probably wouldn’t be a review here.

The Bad

Within the first few minutes of the movie I found myself having a hard time caring for the protagonist. Jonah’s origin story seems so generic in comparison to the one from the graphic novel. I had a hard time finding something that divided him from other action heroes (Aside from the scarred/ disfigured face).

The Ugly

Story is an important thing, especially when the source material is obscure to most people. Iron Man and The Hulk remedied this by devoting almost an entire movie to backstory alone, and both of these stories were better known than Jonah Hex. So, it surprises me that this movie gives you the ten minutes of backstory before jumping into the fray of things. I found myself asking questions about what was going on or why people were doing certain things, none which were ever really answered.

A lot of the acting seems force. None of the characters seem believable in their roles. When it comes down to comic book movies, this is really a make or break factor. However, this doesn’t just apply to the protagonist, but also the antagonist. In Spider-Man, Peter Parker was properly portrayed by Toby Maguire and the Green Goblin by Williem Dafoe. Both characters were believable and so was the conflict between the two. In Jonah Hex, both Josh Brolin’s and John Malkovich’s performances seemed forced, and with it the conflict between them.

Final Verdict

I hate to say this about a comic book movie, but avoid this one. I really was hoping this movie would be a pleasant surprise, but it fell through on everything that could have saved it. My only hope is that a sequel never comes to light.

http://www.charge-shot.com/2010/07/jonah-sux.html

Friday, July 2, 2010
Jonah Sux
Posted by Boivin at 2:00 PM

Every now and then a movie comes along that just makes everyone go "WTF, mate?" Plenty of people get mad at crappy movies infesting the multiplex, especially during the summer when the studios bring out their best and brightest big guns for the Joe Popcorn's entertainment. But sometimes there's a movie...sometimes...there's a movie, that is so bizarrely and mind-bogglingly awful that it transcends our primate minds' ability to comprehend it. It seemingly phases into another reality, beyond space-time, where madness reigns and surreality is the norm.

Jonah Hex is one such movie.

If and when one was told a little over a year ago that DC's pulp western antihero was receiving his own big screen adaptation, the first response would probably be "Jonah who?" I can't confess a staggering degree of familiarity with Jonah Hex ("Make mine Marvel!").

Regardless of how well known Jonah Hex may be, the Studio Powers That Be are clearly running out of licensed comic book properties to run into the ground because now the Jonah Hex movie is out there and we all have to deal with it.

Jonah Hex is your standard revisionist western badass bounty hunter. He's a violent man with a violent past. A veteran of the losing side of the American Civil War, Hex was horribly scarred and left for dead, only to be revived by Native Americans and imbued with the ability to speak to the dead. Sounds like it would make a good movie, right?

Wrong. What could have been a pretty cool movie ends up as a nigh-unintelligible mess. Where does this movie go wrong? I don't known where to start or where to begin. I suppose the earliest blame can be laid at the choice of director. Originally, the project was going to be helmed by Neveldine/Taylor, the geniuses (I'm serious) behind the Crank Duology. But unfortunately they left early on because of Creative Differences. Who did the studio bring in to replace these gonzo action specialists? The guy who directed Horton Hears a Who! Yup. That's probably when you could pretty much declare that this thing was off the rails and destined to be sh*#&%.

The problems are apparent from the start. Jonah's entire backstory, which is important because it directly feeds into the vengeance-is-mine plot of the movie, is told via voiceover. Note to directors,a voiceover is generally the first sign of a ruined movie. Not only that, but instead of, you know, devoting some time to show us what happened with actors and stuff, the story of the murder of Jonah Hex's family and his quest for revenge is shown to us with (bad) comic book-style illustrations flashing across the screen. Further note to directors: comic books work because they're comic books, movies work because they're movies (Sin City is an exception).

Okay, so here we have our protagonist and we don't give a s$#! about him or his story because you, the director of Horton Hears a Who!, bungled the origin story by doing it as a comic book voiceover for no reason. It's not like you had to cut stuff to save running time, the movie isn't even eighty minutes long!

It's pretty clear that the shock of losing the original directors (and the obvious subsequent revisions to their still-credited screenplay) pretty much scuttled this picture. The cast does their best to keep the thing afloat. You have Josh Brolin doing his best Tough Guy, John Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich as the villain, God's Gift to Teenage Boys Megan Fox in a corset (allow me to go on the record and say that I liked Jennifer's Body), and Michael Fassbender as a henchman. That's a halfway decent ensemble! Hell, Will Arnett even shows up for some reason. Apparently Oscar-nominee Michael Shannon was in this movie but I don't even remember seeing him.

But there are some things in here that are just unforgivably bad. There are too many to fit in a single review but two are especially glaring. First of all, the guy who makes Hex's weapons, his Q if you will, is black. This would be all well and good, but the character goes out of the way to essentially forgive ex-Confederate officer Hex for fighting for the South. "We both know you weren't fighting for slavery. You just don't like the government telling you what to do." he says. Gee, I wonder what the government was telling the South not to do back in the Antebellum era? There are ways to tell stories about bitter ex-Confederates; look at just about every western ever, for example. But you don't tell stories about bitter ex-Confederates by having former slaves casually forgive them. That's re-writing history and it's wrong.

Secondly, there's a scene where Hex talks about a dream he had where he killed General Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich), the man who murdered his family. The dream depicts the two men fighting in a dry riverbed with a bizarre red filter thrown over the camera so you know it's a dream. This dream plays out while Hex and Turnbull are fighting for real in the movie's finale. Every time one character punches the other, he punches him in the dream too! It's two fight scenes for the price of one! Clearly the "dream" sequence was shot and scrapped, but Horton Hears a Who! still wanted to use it. "Make it a dream sequence!"

Also, there's a plot about Eli Whitney inventing a Gilded Age super-weapon which ends up being something like what Ron Burgundy would refer to as a "diversity." Basically it's Wild Wild West, but without Josh Brolin doing a rap song describing the plot.

Now that I mention it, I would love to see that.

Jonah Hex is one of those brazenly terrible films that goes the distance and is so bad you can't even be mad at it. But hey, at least it's better than Toy Story 3!

http://www.woogmoog.com/2010/07/02/review-jonah-hex/

July 2nd, 2010 • 07:07
Review: Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex [Photo - Warner Bros.]

Just about the only thing Jonah Hex has going for it is its running time: discounting the credits sequence, the movie’s really only about 75 minutes long. Please don’t take this as a recommendation. Standing outside in the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays for the same amount of time is much more entertaining, and you save a few bucks to boot. Nothing in Jonah Hex works, from the characters to the action to the writing and the special effects: it’s all a boring, stilted mess.

Even the film’s short running time isn’t that much of a blessing – you’ve paid full price for a movie that’s barely an hour long. And, unlike some other bad movies, there’s no decent movie hiding anywhere underneath the editing or the PG-13 rating. Nothing could fix this movie or improve upon it other than the creation of a time machine that prevents it from being made (or at least prevents you from seeing it).

The movie opens with the eponymous bounty hunter gunning down a town of bad guys with a pair of gatling guns strapped to his horse. Does that sound incredibly idiotic to you? Good. I can even see horse-mounted gatling guns being sorta cool, as a hilarious, over-the-top climax to a satisfying series of action sequences, but nothing in this movie comes close to being satisfying or entertaining.

Jonah Hex also gets wrong just about every single Western movie trope, much how the Twilight or Underworld movies miss out on just about every single little detail that makes a vampire movie decent. Instead of beautiful, wide open locales and scenic vistas, we get horribly cramped CG settings. Instead of exciting gun battles and interesting characters, we have Josh Brolin mumbling from one point of contact to the next. I lost count of the number of times Hex walked away from exploding buildings. Hell, according to the movie, everything in the West explodes the way we like to pretend Michael Bay explodes – wooden saloons, arena tents, trains, haystacks, Will Arnett – everything. The action is flat, blurry, and uninteresting. Every time someone is shot, they are flung backwards by a cable some forty feet. Just when you think the movie couldn’t possibly take another dumber left turn, John Malkovich builds a supergun powered by what look to be the seven magic Dragon Balls.

Jonah Hex [Photo - Warner Bros.]

Also, I hope you like Mastodon, because every shot is accompanied by absolutely retarded thrashing metal riffs. Remember when that sort of thing was used to effect sparingly in something like 300? Same thing here, except replace “sparingly” with “fuck you.” It’s horrid.

Say what you will about Wild Wild West, at least that movie had a giant mechanical spider. Jonah Hex had a ridiculous 6 barreled cannon mounted on an ironclad battleship a la Super Mario 3.

The movie is filled with folks who are woefully miscast and misused such as Will Arnett as some sort of U.S. Army lackey. Was there another version of the script where Arnett was Hex’s sidekick? Arnett, like just about every other potentially interesting cast member, has maybe two lines in the whole movie. How the hell do you misuse folks like Lance Reddick, Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Dean Morgan (no idea he was even in this) and Michael Shannon (I swear I don’t even remember seeing him). Hell, even Megan Fox, who’s top billed (or at least, her breasts are) is in the movie like twice.

Gob Bluth is a Civil War Reenactor in between magic show gigs [Photo - Warner Bros.]

Anyway, President Grant orders Will Arnett to go and find Jonah Hex, ex-Confederate and bounty hunter, because he’s apparently the only person that can crack this case and save the free world. But it never seems like Jonah Hex is actually needed to do anything, The army seems to find John Malkovich’s Koopa Cannon just fine by the end without any kind of input from our hero.

The less said about Jonah Hex’s magical powers, the better. It includes way too much backstory and there are way too many weird rules spit out by Brolin’s grumbling expository narrative in one short scene for us to make any sense of it. Here’s how you fix that, filmmakers: Jonah Hex can talk to Bruce Willis. That’s it. Don’t clutter it with some weird slow-motion fistfight taking place on Mars or in Hex’s mind or whatever that was supposed to be.

Director Jimmy Hayward’s only other directing credit is the animated Horton Hears a Who!, and Jonah Hex makes clear that he should turn right around and head back to being an animator. Apparently director Francis Lawrence was brought in for some heavy reshoots. Maybe the movie could have been good, if you did the following: find the people who did production design on Hellboy (it’s very hard to make the Wild West look dull), have Lawrence direct the whole thing, make it basically like Constantine and Punisher: War Zone by way of Sergio Leone, and voila, halfway decent movie. Basically, to improve this movie, you need to change just about every single aspect of it. That is not a good thing.

Again, the short length is probably the movie’s only blessing. Had I been crossing the 90 minute mark, I would have been begging for sweet, sweet release with every dynamite-launching pistol fired.

I don’t know much about Jonah Hex even within his own comics, but if you can’t do better than a 22-minute episode of Batman: The Animated Series which featured Hex in a flashback with Ra’s Al Ghul, steam airships, Malcolm McDowell and f#%@#&! ninjas, what are you even trying to accomplish? Why does your movie exist?

World 8-Hex

BOTTOM LINE: Dumb, annoying, nonsensical, ugly. Extra point awarded for a scene where Josh Brolin vomits out a crow, and an extra half point for Lance Reddick’s character’s incredibly inane line, “Happy Fourth of July, son.” Do not waste your time. Not even bad in that “so bad it’s great” vibe. Just awful.

1.8/10

http://thepasswordisswordfish.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/jonah-hex-its-bad-but-not-as-bad-as-the-hype/

Jonah Hex: It’s Bad… But Not as Bad as the Hype

Judging by Jonah Hex’s flopping with the critics and audiences, I naturally couldn’t wait to see it in order to continue to dogpile on it and write something scathing and nasty. However, after leaving the theater, I wondered why literally no one liked it. Yes, it’s definitely bad, that goes without saying. A lot of it is very silly– not just the dialogue, but the entire idea and execution of the plot are at times laughable. Yet the visuals are fairly sleek, and the performances by most of the main actors are perfectly executed, reaching the appropriate levels of hamminess that help carry a comic book film of this nature. Sure, it’s not a good movie… but unlike Prince of Persia or Robin Hood, this film is not pretentious, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it doesn’t really disappoint. But then again, maybe those other films suffered from having commercials that fooled you into thinking it might be good, thus giving you expectations that then were let down.

There was a Confederate soldier by the name of Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), who was the meanest, rootinest, tootinest, gun-shootinest man in the South. Unfortunately, when he killed his best friend Jeb, Jeb’s father, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) got revenge by killing Jonah’s wife and son and branding Jonah’s face. Flash forward several years later: Turnbull was killed in a hotel fire and Jonah has been working as a bounty hunter since. When he nearly died after being branded, he gained the ability to talk to the dead by touching them. As he find out, Turnbull might not be as dead as everyone thought… and like most maniacal Malkovich villains, he’s planning on destroying the country with a superweapon invented by Eli Whitney and then hidden by the government. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly. The government finds Jonah with his faithful hooker, Lila (Megan Fox), are enlists him to hunt down Turnbull, save the country, and finally have his revenge.

It’s enormously obvious why this movie is a flop– the entire premise is silly, even by science fiction movie standards. There are several familiar elements at play here: the cowboy out for vengeance, the John Malkovich villain out to destroy the world for no real reason, the hooker with the heart of gold, the near-death experience giving a man magical powers, the hero that just won’t die, the destructive superweapon made by the inventor of the cotton gin and then covered up by the government. Okay, scratch the last part. However, when all are combined, it raises questions. Hex kills Turnbull’s son, an officer in his own army, and then is happily hanging out with his wife and kid at home– didn’t he know something bad would happen to him? How did Turnbull find out about this top secret weapon? Why does Megan Fox inexplicably love the ugly mean and murderous Jonah Hex who is clearly much older than her? Is prostitution literally the only job available to women in Westerns? There are only two types of women in this entire film: loving mothers… and hookers.

Okay, so the film wasn’t well thought out. Then why am I not trashing it harder? Because they did a couple of things right in the making of this film. They put some great actors who know how to deliver this dialogue. John Malkovich can do this role in his sleep, and he attacks his dialogue and his southern accent like a wild animal. Michael Fassbender, who’s amassing quite a resume for himself, steals the show as the Irish, derby-sporting, knife-wielding #2 to Turnbull, cackling psychotically and twisting every phrase beautifully. Josh Brolin manages to make Jonah, who could have easily been humorous and brooding, rather funny; when explaining why the reincarnating dead burn up in the sun unless dirt is put on their bodies, he says, “Dead like dirt, dirt like dead. Simple as that.”… and he finds the silliness in the line and somehow makes it work. Good character actors can sell this kind of campy material (Megan Fox doesn’t fare as well, far more comfortable in this film during the action scenes than in the acting). The effects, for the most part, are fine, and the cinematography makes the film look sleek and compelling.

The smartest choice, however, is likely the one that made this film so disposable to the critics– it’s very short, roughly 75 minutes long. Would critics have preferred a slower-paced Jonah Hex, or to have to sit in their seats observing this foolishness for another hour? They knew what they were getting into, saw the way the movie was shaping up in the editing room, and figured that the way to fix it as much as they could would be to trim literally all of the fat and make it as quick-paced as possible. Is this tantamount to film suicide? Sure, I suppose. It is a way for the studio to tell you in a not-so-discreet way, “Our movie sucks.” While it’s definitely not good, there’s a camp value to this film that inches it more toward redemption than absolute failure. This is the type of movie that if it comes on cable TV in a couple of years on a lazy Sunday, you can leave on and enjoy with a laugh over some lunch. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not, nor does it take itself too seriously. In the aftermath of the recent Batman revivals, we’ve now seen a rash of action movies which take themselves very seriously. Jonah Hex is a throwback– a movie that’s utterly disposable but good for a couple of chuckles and thrills. The studio is paying a big price for these couple of chuckles and thrills… but I can safely say I’d watch this again before Prince of Persia any day of the week. Malkovich alone almost guarantees that.

2/4

http://aaeblog.com/2010/07/04/jonah-sux/\\


Jonah Sux

Jul 04 by Roderick | 3 comments

I can’t really say I was disappointed by the Jonah Hex movie, because I had low expectations going in. But they certainly did a thorough job of ruining a good story. (Spoilers follow, if it matters.)

Jonah Hex

At least they picked the right story to tell – the excellent Quentin Turnbull arc from the early Weird Western Tales days. They even (mostly) abandoned their earlier plans to combine the Turnbull arc with a zombie story. But then they got rid of just about everything that made the Turnbull story interesting, and replaced it with a mass of clichés.

In the original story, Hex was framed for betraying his comrades and killing Turnbull’s son; in the movie, he actually did it (and it all happens offscreen, thus weakening its dramatic impact) but it’s presented as justified (as anti-terrorism, what else?). In the original story, Turnbull is pursuing Hex for revenge; in the movie, Turnbull has already taken revenge (by scarring Hex’s face and killing his family – things he wasn’t responsible for in the comics) and it’s Hex who’s out for counter-revenge. Nor was Turnbull originally a James-Bond-style supervillain with plans to blow up Washington DC with glowing orange torpedoes launched from a scarlet steampunk submarine; he was just a bitter old man who’d lost his son. The original story featured both Union and Confederate villainy; the movie ramps up the Confederate villainy and erases the Union villainy. And unlike the comics, the movie never shows us the affection that Jonah Hex and Quentin Turnbull originally felt for each other. In short, most of the moral complexity of the original story is ironed out, along with most of the drama.

In general the movie seems unsure how to handle Hex’s Confederate past. In the comics, Hex had found himself unwilling to fight any longer for the Confederacy (primarily because of the slavery issue), but also unwilling to turn his former comrades over to Union forces; that’s apparently not anti-Confederate enough by contemporary Hollywood standards (Civil War movies nowadays tend to whitewash the Union, just as in the old days they tended to whitewash the Confederacy), so, as I mentioned, the movie actually has Hex betray them and shoot his best friend (though, strangely, for reasons that have nothing to do with slavery). Moreover, the chief plot concerns Hex’s protecting the Federal capital from an attack by unreconstructed Confederates. But the movie also has Hex, in dialogue, say that he rejects both the Confederate and Union causes as hypocritical. We’re further told that Hex never favoured secession, yet the rebel anthem that plays over the closing credits suggests the opposite. It’s as though the script had been co-authored by a Union apologist, a Confederate apologist, and a curse-on-both-your-houses Hummelite. Well, something for everyone, I guess. (Interestingly, the Confederate villains never give a clue as to what they were fighting for; they say nothing about slavery, secession, or anything else. Instead, they’re depicted as being motivated by pure ungrounded hatred of America.)

Jonah Hex

Moreover: in the comics, although Hex’s adventures occasionally included supernatural or science-fiction elements, they weren’t the norm (apart from what I’ve elsewhere called Phases III and IV, both relatively brief), and Hex himself was certainly never portrayed as possessing supernatural powers. Seeing Hex raising the dead and Turnbull wielding a futuristic super-weapon (or indeed Hex himself wielding slightly futuristic weapons) was jarring. And what’s up with all the crows, and the constant reversion to the red-tinged astral plane or whatever it was? The movie keeps focusing on these as if they’re going to be important, but they turn out not to be and are never explained.

Between the high-tech doomsday weaponry, Megan Fox running around pointlessly in her underwear, and originally complex antagonists transformed into simplistic over-the-top moustache-twirling Confederate-flag-waving megalomaniacal psychos with bad Southern accidents, I kept having unpleasant flashbacks to watching the 1999 Wild Wild West movie desecrating yet another childhood favourite – though this movie wasn’t as bad as that one. (The recent Sherlock Holmes movie, though much better than either mess, had similar problems.)

As for casting: Josh Brolin didn’t quite capture Hex for me (the character was inspired by Clint Eastwood’s westerns, and it’s hard for me to see anyone but Eastwood in the role) but he actually did a decent job. The rest of the cast didn’t do so well (apart from Michael Fassbender, who was fun to watch as a psychotic Irish assassin). John Malkovich basically just walked through his part; but it’s hard to blame him, as the character of Turnbull was made into a cardboard villain, leaving Malkovich very little to work with. (I’d love to see Malkovich tackle the role of the original Turnbull.) As I’d feared (here and here), Megan Fox as Lilah was blah; and her passing mention that her real name was Tallulah Black – no doubt intended as a nod to the fans – was really closer to being an insult to the fans. In the comics, Tallulah Black is the female equivalent of Hex himself: hard-bitten, cold-blooded, cynical, vengeful, massively scarred, and missing an eye. Well, Hollywood isn’t going to go for a massively scarred Megan Fox, and as for the rest, Fox is not exactly the ideal actress for that sort of thing; Angelina Jolie would be a better choice. (For the original Quentin Turnbull arc, see Showcase Presents Jonah Hex; for the first appearance of Tallulah Black, see Jonah Hex: Origins.)

Tallulah Black and Jonah Hex

A couple of other gripes: for a movie about a character so obviously inspired by the spaghetti westerns, it rarely makes an attempt to look interesting. Contrast the unforgettable opening scenes of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly or Once Upon a Time in the West with … well, I’ve already forgotten the opening scene of Jonah Hex. The spaghetti westerns also knew how to build suspense with pauses and silence, while Jonah Hex has A.D.D. pacing, evidently subscribing to the view – a popular one in Hollywood – that nothing builds excitement like a relentless, nonstop barrage of bigger and bigger explosions. Also, you’d never guess that Jonah Hex is any kind of western at all, for there are no distinctively western landscapes; in fact most of the action takes place in the southeast, and the one scene that I guess is supposed to be in the west is a giant sandpit that is apparently someone’s idea of what a southwestern desert looks like.

In addition: voiceover narration is a very tricky thing; it can be done well, but it seldom is, and narration from a character who’s supposed to be somewhat mysterious and remote, like Hex, is an especially bad idea. (Would The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly be improved by narration from Eastwood’s character?)

Finally: for a movie that features not only Ulysses Grant but also the White House, the Capitol Building, and an under-construction Washington Monument, the disclaimer at the end that all persons and buildings were fictional was an appropriately risible and bogus ending to a risible and bogus film.